


The Neon God They Made

by emrisemrisemris



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Control Ending, M/M, Reapers, post-ME3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-20
Updated: 2017-09-20
Packaged: 2019-01-01 01:46:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12145971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emrisemrisemris/pseuds/emrisemrisemris
Summary: Kaidan and Garrus, after the end, in the shadow of the Reapers.





	The Neon God They Made

  

_I.     STILL REMAINS_

 

Two Reapers stand distantly visible on the long horizon of English Bay. Earth bristles with them: they cluster like flies around the population centres, watching, rebuilding.

Approaching from space you could almost think that nothing had changed: the outer planets with their girdles of busy refineries, the dusty dot of Mars, and there, home, all blue and green and marbled with clouds, as heart-achingly beautiful as the day you first left it behind you. For a moment the years melt away, until the black bulk of a Sovereign-class swims lazily out from the lee of Luna and rakes its red gaze across the ship.

If it recognises you, it makes no indication of it.

You are permitted to land. _Cipritine_ hums obligingly as she swings out of orbit, down through the outer atmosphere as her hull warms and the engine rumbles, shields taking up the strain. Somewhere down below he'll be waiting for you, watching your re-entry scratch a bright line across the night sky.

You are not permitted to be off Earth together. Your conquerors let the great mass of humanity - and indeed their other client races - do more or less as they please; but there are certain people they monitor. The former crew of the _Normandy,_ such as survive, are all included. You like to think that the two of you - senior human Spectre and prominent turian diplomat, third in line to the primarchy, now - might have merited the attention on your own; that this is not still Shepard hanging over your lives even now.

 

_*_

_II.     TALKING WITHOUT SPEAKING_

 

It's been too long.

Garrus is waiting at the front door as your aircar comes to a stop, and doesn't even give you enough time to get your luggage out of the back seat before pulling you into his arms. This is not simple gladness to see you: this is the kind of relief that comes spilling out as hot as bile, and as stomach-wrenching.

You have passed a dozen Reapers merely on approach, countless more since you left him here in the little house looking out toward the bay, and any one of them might have decided - or been ordered - that now was the time to pick _Cipritine_ out of the sky. Such things happen less frequently than they did. But they still happen.

Your house is small and clean: neither of you can shake the habits of military tidiness, and too much space makes your spine crawl and your shoulders tense and biotic artefacts start to crawl around your fingers as your implant thinks you're readying for combat.

You argued, when it became clear that you would be made to choose a home that could be watched, over whether to settle on Earth or Palaven. It was Garrus who gave in, when he understood how desperate you were to go home. If he does succeed to the primarchy one day, it will be in exile. This has been the case before, as he reminds you whenever you bring it up: turian history is as messy and vicious as human and there is more of it. There are a dozen wild epics of ancient primarchs relinquishing home and family in the name of promises made elsewhere.

You have reminded him that most of them are tragedies. _Not_ all _of them,_ he says.

Tonight he holds you on the threshold of the house, hide rough and cool, and with the faint distinctive scent that always reminds you of cinnamon. You bump foreheads, and demand to be let in before you starve to death. You cook: two meals, two plates, the careful measuring of ingredients you've never tasted but are reassured are right.

Garrus bounces restlessly around the kitchen, comes up behind you at the stove to steal a hug and rest his chin on your head, and generally gets in the way. It's almost like the future you dared to dream of, all that time ago.

 

_*_

_III._       _SILENCE LIKE A CANCER_

These are the facts:

The war was all but lost until the detonation of the Crucible, the galaxy fractured and disunited, the spacefaring races unable even then to put their grudges aside long enough to mount a unified resistance.

The Crucible failed to destroy the Reapers as hoped, though they ceased fire when the pulse went off.

Shepard made it as far as the Crucible's control chamber before his implant radio died.

He never came back.

This is the part you, and Garrus, and others, pieced together in the months and years after the fact: something happened, there in the killing sky over London, that changed the Reapers' minds, or mind. The change lined up too neatly with Shepard's reaching the Crucible to be coincidence.

There have been a thousand books and a dozen grimy war films imagining the conversation between Shepard and the Reaper-mind. Some give him passionate speeches on the worth of mortal life. Some, which privately strike both of you as more realistic, show the Commander throwing down the gauntlet: truce or annihilation.

The best - by which you mean the one that nags at your memories, because it chimes altogether too closely with the man you knew - has Harbinger rising to the glass like an avenging angel and Shepard, eyes glowing, hand on the button, saying only: _No more._

This is the fact: by some means, by persuasion or coercion, the Reapers reduced their project from extermination to simple conquest. The galaxy is, by any measure, theirs. They have replenished their ranks, efficient as ever, recycling the war debris haloing a thousand worlds into new chassis, and filling their veins with the rendered bodies of the dead.

 

_*_

_IV.      MY ARMS, THAT I MIGHT REACH YOU_

 

You've been on mission for months, and are owed leave. Garrus can spare a few days before he's needed back in Tokyo, or Lagos, or Geneva, or wherever his attention is next demanded. (He's seen more of Earth than you have, now.)

There's a little cabin up in the mountains, merely bracing rather than lethal at this time of year. You shut up the city house and go, just the two of you, with the aircar on autopilot and your armour and his weapons loaded in the back. You spend most of the journey half-asleep, head on his shoulder; turians are well-shaped for it, the hollow between jaw and collarbone wide and soft.

The cabin is clean and neatly ordered, just as you left it; if it's been searched, it was by hands that left not a hair out of place.

You haul the luggage in and then, before even unpacking, fall down with Garrus on the pristine bed and order him out of his armour. The purr in his voice as he says _Yes, Kaidan_ brings as much heat to your skin as the first time, and reminds you forcefully how long you've been apart.

For all his dry commentary about being a poor turian, Garrus is very, _very_ good at taking orders when he wants to.

All that wiry strength, all that coiled power - he has a punch like an iron bar, and you know he goes easy on you when you spar together - all yours, all freely given.

You go slowly, because you haven't touched him in months and need to … refamiliarise yourself. (You tell him as much. He tells you that's just cruel.) He cups the back of your head while you kiss his mandibles, fingers exploring the edges of your implant and catching desperately in your hair.

You're beautiful together, did you know that? You probably never thought about that.

You tease him with mouth and fingers and biotics until you're too turned on to hold on much longer yourself, and then (after he's asked nicely, eyes dancing) fuck, digging your fingers into his hips until your translation system gives up on trying to get coherent words out of what he's saying and his claws leave long gouges in the headboard of the bed.

You bring him water and a cup of - well, it isn't coffee, or anything remotely like it; but it comes out of a plant and is loaded with dextro stimulants and fits into turian culture in the same ubiquitous way. You sit in bed together and let your hearts slow down. You hold hands, five fingers in three, and look at the rumpled bedsheets and all the luggage you still need to put away.

You remember the times when this little slice of mundanity seemed like an impossible, maudlin dream, and hold his hand more tightly.

You sit outside that evening, bundled up against the chill, with hot drinks and omni-tool star maps, picking out the constellations and triangulating the directions to the relay, to the Citadel, to Palaven. The forest rises on the slopes beneath and above you, and the distant horizon is lost in shadow and haze. There are no Reapers here.

Until, for a moment, a bright scratch of light shows at the darkened edge of the moon: a freeze-frame meteor, or a lightning-flash seen from a quarter of a million miles. Too far, far too far, to see the reddish tinge to the edges of the beam, or hear the gut-wrenching resonating chord.

Your treacherous memory supplies every missing detail of the ship as it dies, down to the stink as the beam carves its way through layers of metal and plastic and tile. The hiss of escaping air. The cold flooding in ...

Garrus reaches for your hand, and suggests you go inside.

 

_*_

_V.     THE NEON GOD THEY MADE_

 

You've been a soldier long enough to know that peace isn't a null state. It's like an engine: that beautiful smooth ride is the product of regulations and maintenance and _power,_ every moment of every minute of every day. Take your eye off it and it'll stumble; forget to clean out the grit, and it'll fail.

That's nothing to do with morals, or philosophy, or politics. That's to do with engines.

Occasionally, when he's feeling bitter - or when Tali visits, or one of Legion's innumerable version-children - Garrus gets to rhapsodising about how even one Reaper is a miracle of engineering on a scale the young races can only dream of. Who built them, he wonders? Somebody must have done, back at the dawn of time; but for aeons now they've built one another. Miracles of engineering, and miraculous engineers.

It shouldn't have surprised anyone that a force so adept at destabilising civilisations would also be reasonably good at re-stabilising them. Look at everything they've done for you: rebuilding the detritus of the war is only a fraction of it. Repairing relays that have been dormant for millennia, opening up whole swathes of the galaxy to new discovery. Terraforming. Starforming. Genomics. Tuchanka is lush and green now, the Shroud only a memorial. Haestrom's star is cool again. Half a dozen fatal diseases cured.

Isn't this better?

You and Garrus found one another in the last days of a war you knew you couldn't win. You expected to die; when you lay awake in his arms and hoped for a miracle, you imagined a desperate victory, a few survivors left to rebuild among the ruins. You didn't think of this calculated peace, this icy mercy. It sticks in your throat.

But you're _alive._

You, Kaidan.

And Garrus, and billions of other lovers across the galaxy; who wake up every morning breathing one another's skin, who will live to the end of your days in comfort.

There will never be another Mindoir, never another Torfan.

No more.

 

 


End file.
